Before submitting your app to the Store, take some time to review your app’s manifest and the information and files it references. Mostly concentrate on the Application UI tab in Visual Studio’s manifest editor. If you haven’t noticed or installed recent Visual Studio updates, the VS team improved the editor by bringing all of the app’s UI elements into the Application UI tab. Earlier, bits of UI like the Store logo were on the Packaging tab, which made it easy to miss. Now it’s all together, plus, it shows you every scaled version of every graphical asset (there’s so much to scroll now you can’t get it into one screen shot):

Here’s what to pay special attention to:

Make sure that all logos (logo, wide logo, small logo, and store logo) are all representative of your app. Avoid shipping an app with any of the default graphics from the VS templates. Note that the Store logo never shows up in the running app, so you won’t notice it at runtime.

Double-check how you’re using the Show Name option along with Short Name and/or Display Name. Go to the Start screen and switch your app tile between square and wide, and see if the tile appears like you want it to. In the graphics above, notice how the app’s name is included on the tile images already, so having Show Name set to “All logos” will make the tile look silly (see below). So I’d want to make sure I change that setting, in this case, to “No logos.” However, if my square tile, perhaps, did not have the app name in text, then I’d want to set it to “Standard logo only.”

If you set Short Name, its text will be used on the tile instead of Display Name.

Be aware that if you’re using live tiles, the XML update for a tile can specify whether the display/short name should be shown in the branding attribute. See my post on the Windows 8 Developer Blog, Alive with Activity Part 1, for details.

If you don’t have specific scaled assets, reevaluate your choices here. Remember that if you don’t provide a specific version for each given pixel density, Windows will take one of the others and stretch or shrink it as needed, meaning that the app might not looks its best.

Examine the relationship between the small logo, your specified tile background color, and any live tile updates and toast notifications you might use. Live tiles and toasts can specify whether to show the small logo, and the tile background color is used in both instances. If you have a mismatch between the small logo edge colors and the background color, you’ll see an obvious edge in tiles and toasts.